Assad Regime’s Collapse Should Strike Fear in the Hearts of All Tyrants | Opinion

On Dec. 10, longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow and abdicated his position as the country’s strongman after a whirlwind 12 days of regime collapse. He had inherited his autocracy, along with the banal instruments of repression and delusion used to control the country’s restive, multi-ethnic, multi-religious subjects, from his late father, Hafez al-Assad in 2000. In barely a decade, the younger Assad mismanaged his fiefdom so thoroughly that it ignited in flames during the Arab Spring and never really stopped burning, despite barbaric reinforcement from like-minded tyrants in Moscow and Tehran and cynical indifference from most global leaders.

I am not a professional expert on Syria, but I spent 10 days traveling through the country in 2003, to cap off a summer studying Arabic at the American University in Beirut. At the time, I had never visited a truly authoritarian country, and the experience was both unforgettable and sobering. Like war-torn Lebanon, bored soldiers holding assault rifles were a staple of daily life on street corners throughout Damascus. My friends and I–young, overconfident and naive–tried several times to engage people in political conversations, only to be met with wide-eyed fear and quick farewells.

This was only a few months after President George W. Bush’s catastrophically ill-advised Iraq War was launched, and I repeatedly pretended to be Canadian, only to be busted by bemused Syrians who dismantled the pretense effortlessly. “How many provinces are there in Canada?” they would ask, knowing I did not have the answer.

Rather than thirsting for the blood of Americans as we had been taught to fear by U.S. media, virtually everyone we met was almost preposterously kind. One tour guide in Palmyra (whose ancient Roman ruins were largely destroyed during the mid-decade ISIS onslaught) invited us back to his house for dinner. We got more than a few earfuls about Bush but were left with nothing but gratitude for our hosts, many of whom were happy just to see tourists—any tourists—in a time of upheaval.

But Syria was poor and almost unbearably tense. The feeling that simmering rivalries and differences were being held together with little more than the fear of state violence was palpable. The Assad regime survived on violence and complicity. But to be sustainable in any authoritarian context, that violence cannot be wielded every single day. Citizens must, on the contrary, be taught to obey with only the implicit threat of violent coercion and the promise of advancement and safety if they comply.

A civil war that lasts more than a decade and drives millions of people into exile seems like it would quickly shatter that bargain. But in the more than 13 years since the Arab uprisings reached Syria, the Assad regime managed to survive. The eminent Syria scholar Lisa Wedeen, in Authoritarian Apprehensions, wrote that the regime persisted by producing “a silent majority of citizens invested in stability and fearful of disorder,” largely in metropolises like Damascus and Aleppo where order had more or less been restored.

But clearly that bargain had eroded, and much more swiftly than anyone outside of Syria understood or anticipated. In an eerie repeat of the way that the lavishly funded Iraqi armed forces fled from Mosul in the face of the ISIS advance in 2014, Assad’s forces seemingly melted away after a coalition of rebels seized Aleppo. One day, there were tens of thousands of heavily armed Syrians willing to fight and die to preserve Assad’s hold on the country, and the next day they were simply gone.

The scholar Timur Kuran once wrote that “the suppression of one’s wants entails a loss of personal autonomy, a sacrifice of personal integrity. It thus generates lasting discomfort, the more so the greater the lie.” He called this phenomenon, which is common in authoritarian regimes, “preference falsification,” and argued that it can vanish in a kind of cascade that sweeps away even seemingly entrenched authoritarian rule. These authoritarian collapses shock us because “society can come to the brink of a revolution without anyone knowing” what is about to happen until ordinary people stop pretending that they support the regime.

“The pace of the advance was as dizzying as its implications,” wrote Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times of the rebels’ sudden advance on Aleppo and then Damascus over the past two weeks. The collapse of Assad’s tyranny was “dizzying” for external observers in the United States, and likely shocking for the regime’s chief enablers in Moscow and Tehran, who spent billions of dollars and sent untold numbers of their own citizens to their deaths in an effort to preserve the desultory status quo in Syria.

The resilience of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s sclerotic dictatorship, as well as the Islamic Republic’s inept theocracy, has long mystified observers who, with some reason, expected economic shocks and military setbacks to topple these regimes that have inflicted widespread misery on their own citizens with very little to show for it.

If any of the many Syrians who showed me kindness and grace in 2003 have survived the new century’s violence, I hope that they are experiencing deliverance, joy, and hope for the future. As for those responsible for the decades of horror visited upon the innocent by predatory elites—in Syria, Iran, Russia, and elsewhere, may they finally realize that their reckoning cannot be delayed forever.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.